Quote Originally Posted by DIYSwede View Post
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Morale: Today's bad engineering can provide tomorrow's clickbaits and big tourist attractions in a few centuries...
My understanding is that aircraft with canards must have the canard surfaces under constant computerized control to maintain stability. This seems to be borne out by the Wiki article on the JAS 39, which states

"The Gripen has a delta wing and canard configuration with relaxed stability design and fly-by-wire flight controls."

A further Wiki reference explains "relaxed stability" as

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"In aviation, relaxed or negative stability is the tendency of an aircraft to change its pitch and bank angles spontaneously. An aircraft with relaxed stability cannot be trimmed to maintain a certain attitude, and will, when disturbed in pitch or roll, continue to pitch or roll in the direction of the disturbance at an ever-increasing rate."
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so you're depending on the computer and its software to keep the plane in stable flight. Perhaps it provides some performance advantage but I don't want to fly in anything with canards.

Completely OT but didn't the Wright flyer have a single forward canard control surface?